Vilidorn - who fought the giant squid

Once in a warm sea time there lived a man of the folk, mighty and strong. Vilidorn was his name. His pebble-hard muscles stood out on giant limbs and his proud head stood high on his sturdy neck. Across his massive shoulders, matted with curling hair, his strength moved in rippling show, and knotted ropes of mighty sinew were his arms. Straddled firmly on his powerful legs, feet rooted in the bedded sand, this man was a rock of fortitude and stubborn will.
A hard man was Vilidorn, and proud. He laughed at the trembling efforts of the folk to topple him, and could hold three adversaries at a time to submission beneath the waters. In wrestling and grappling no one was his master. It was said his strength outmatched the very waves.
On days of storm, when mountainous breakers roared, it was his habit to defy the sea: standing motionless in one chosen spot he would shout his challenge, his full beard shaking off the spray, his red mouth laughing. Though the waves burst above his head he would not surrender, only with the dying of the storm would he step aside, kicking the last wavelets beneath his heel. Deriding their weakness he left at last and went to venture on the ocean path, calling his challenge across the deeps.
‘I am Vilidorn, strongest of the sea folk! None can hold me against my will!’
Fish rushed away beneath him. Sea birds cried, raucous, above his head.
‘Be afraid!’ they seemed to say. ‘Beware, for one may come from the darkest cavern of the deep, whose strength you cannot guess!’
Vilidorn sensed the awesome fall beneath him, and he tried in ever farther dives to sound the creatures of the deep with his challenge.
‘I am Vilidorn and you cannot hold me! I do not fear your year-long dark.’
So then the serpent rose to the daylight, its shiny length thrashing the surface, searching for Vilidorn.
The looping body pulsed over Vilidorn’s flesh, huge suckers clung to his skin, and now he felt it draw him down. Around him its many folds throbbed and flailed as Vilidorn braced his legs and arms to force aside the pressing coils. Around his ribs one squeezing circle lay, another turned and knotted about his legs. With panic strength he ripped the slapping tail from his neck and felt the tearing of his own flesh in those thousand sucking mouths. The water clouded before him and through the murk he saw the serpent’s glowing eyes and grasping beak.
With that strength which was once his pride now dying to hollows in his arms and legs yet Vilidorn struggled on to halt his enemy. Blood from his many wounds swirled in the sea about him, like shadowy serpents trailing out his death. And yet he fiercely placed his foot against that hard shell beak, stamped back his heel into a yellowed eye. It was his final thrust and blackness pressed upon him as he felt his last air crushed out of his folded lungs.
And in that moment the grappling coils were torn away and he was freed.
Up! Up to the air again! Helpless as the weakest of the folk, Vilidorn lay on the wave tops savouring life and heard the sea birds cry, joyous, above him and watched the dash of silvered fish below.
‘Be grateful,’ they seemed to say. ‘Thank the friend who came from the deeps to your salvation.’
Then, marked across his huge brow by white craters of torn flesh from the struggle he had won, the massive head of Serbadon, the toothed whale, rose from the waters, and his quiet eye sought out Vilidorn.
‘Know yourself now, Vilidorn of the Sea Folk, and put away your pride.’
‘My life is yours, lord, and in your generosity my only pride,’ replied the weary man. ‘How can I serve you in all the days you have given me?’
‘When your strength returns you may serve me, and you may help my unhappy people: return to your beaches and watch there for my brothers. Alone and melancholy they swim onto the land to end their lives. If you can, with your strength, take them back to the deeps to die in dignity; stay by their side until the last, and try, Vilidorn, to be sure that none of my people shall ever again drift unfriended into that final abyss.’
‘Trust me in this,’ swore Vilidorn.
At that solemn pledge Serbadon sighed heavily and rolled down to the lonely deeps once more.
Then Vilidorn came again to the beach of his borning, silent and understanding, to begin his lifetime duty. So it is to this time still true that no whale will die alone if Sea Folk can be by; for this we owe that great mind in the deeps who once saved proud Vilidorn.